Christian Mommy: Love Isn’t Necessary to Get Married; That’s “a Hollywood Thing”

Of all the bizarre views espoused by Christian blogger and professional mommy-shamer Lori Alexander (a.k.a. “The Transformed Wife”), perhaps the oddest one is that you should marry someone who fits a proper gender role and loves God even if you’re not in love with each other. In her mind, God will eventually bring you together and the kids and grandkids will seal the deal.

She said all this very explicitly in a video yesterday that also doubles as a cry for help.

She opens the video with a confession:

I was not passionately in love with my husband when I married him. In fact, I didn’t really have much feelings of love towards him, and this concerned me greatly…

She says there was attraction, but it wasn’t love. She was critical of how he ate — as if getting annoyed with some of your partner’s habits and tics is somehow weird — but soon stopped herself from manipulating him like that. And then she married him because “he definitely loved the Lord deeply.”

They’ve now been married for over 40 years… but it’s not like everything was ideal:

… a lot of my problem in marrying my husband, and in the first 20 years of my marriage, were those critical negative thoughts and judging him instead of showing him mercy as God wanted me to do…

If you weren’t in love with your partner, and spent two decades trying to change something that seriously bothered you, it’s hard to make a case that this is a good match. Loving your kids or grandkids doesn’t justify staying in a relationship you settle for in the name of Jesus.

And, of course, Alexander says having sex before marriage would ruin a relationship because feelings would get involved — as if sex always has to be emotional and as if feelings are something to avoid.

It’s none of my business if her marriage is working or not. The video strikes me as someone trying to convince herself she made the right choices rather than someone trying to convince everyone else to make them. But let me remind you that she’s previously written about how women should just give sex to their husbands whenever he wants it, regardless of how she’s feeling, because “how long does it take?!“

She’s also argued that staying married for the sake of the children is always preferable to divorce. Plenty of people who ended their marriages will tell you it was the right thing to do — and their kids will agree. Sometimes, ending a marriage really is what’s best for children.

Maybe the most damning thing she says in the video is that you don’t need to be “madly in love” to marry someone because that kind of passion is “kind of a Hollywood thing anyway.”

If that’s what your relationship is like, then you shouldn’t be getting married.

Lori Alexander is a perfect example of what not to do. The scary thing is that her mindset isn’t unusual in conservative Christian circles where Purity Balls take place, and abstinence is rewarded, and love/sex/passion all take a backseat to a godly provider.